Research tips to improve your
searches
Narrowing your searches
Learning outcomes
Strategies to narrow your searches using:
•
AND
•
Phrase searching
•
proximity searching
•
Additional strategies
Combining search terms using AND
•
Narrows search results
•
Used for combining two or more words which
must appear in your search results:
beatlemania AND culture
beatlemania
culture
Combining search terms using AND
Search:
beatlemania and culture
Other representations of AND
Beatlemania and culture
Beatlemania AND culture
Beatlemania + culture
Beatlemania & culture
Phrase searching
•
Finds two or more words in exact order:
“swine flu”
“British Columbia”
“not for profit”
The
“ ”
keeps the phrase intact
Proximity searching
•
NEAR
- Looks for strings of words within a
given distance of one other regardless of
order, e.g.
tax N5 reform
•
WITHIN
- Looks for strings of words within a
given distance of one another in a specific
order, e.g.
tax W5 reform
Additional strategies
•
Narrow by date range
–
e.g. 2000-2010
•
Narrow by publication type
–
e.g. scholarly, academic peer-reviewed
•
Narrow by geographic location
–
e.g. country, province/state, city
•
Narrow by demographic
–
e.g. age-range, gender, ethnicity
Questions/Comments
Reference Librarians
reflib@royalroads.ca
250-391-2575
We look forward to hearing from you!
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